Out of the tears

World Cup Tests Iranians' Ability to Have Fun in Public

Michael Slackman in the Times: As Iran's team prepares to step onto the field of the World Cup for only the second time since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the soccer fever gripping the country reveals many of the pressures reshaping Iranian society. While Iran confronts the West over its nuclear program and its president promotes Holocaust denial, the country is also struggling with something far more fundamental: how to have fun together in public.

It is a challenge that has forced Iranians to try to sort through the intersecting strands of their identity, to confront decades of clerical rule that have emphasized traditions of mourning and to accommodate a population increasingly dominated by young people who are far more aware of the world beyond Iran.

"We do speak about this problem: how can we have a happy society?" said Behrouz Gharibpour, director of the main cultural center in Tehran. "We are in the center of trying to change, to find a good and accepted way to be happy — when we want to be happy."

Soccer, it turns out, has been one of the catalysts propelling that effort.

"As a people, we have this very sad streak in us," said Mansoureh Ettehadieh, a publisher and historian in Tehran. "Most of our music is sad. The Shia color is black." ...

"If they win, all of the people will express their emotions, 100 percent, and there will be no power to prevent them from doing this," said Ali Mudi, 44, as he sat in Laleh Park in Tehran. His friend Ahmed Maghail, 82, said he relished the idea of such a celebration: "All of the happiness and celebrations in my life were before 27 years ago."

How long can a regime last when its people are forced to keep much of life's emotions and experiences bottled up inside?

I guess one answer is it depends on whether the regime changes. China, for example, under the predecessors of its present rules went through as much madness as any modern country has had to experience, certainly more during the course of the 'Great Leap Forward' and Cultural Revolution than Iranians have had to bear.

I wonder if China's experiences then and Iran's now were and are in some ways necessary, a sort of mad cleansing to ensure a break with history. In Iran's case, the Shah--installed and maintained by the U.S.--ran a brutal dictatorship from 1941 to 1979. The mullahs have been in power for only a fraction of that time; but because the Islamic Republic stripped the previously-elite of the wealth and power they had amassed under the Shah's plutocracy, there are squawks of outrage now from them that were wholly absent when Iran's poor was the main victim.

In China's case, everybody suffered pretty much equally in the 60s and 70s as the Communist party tried to figure out how to work through the effects of installing equality in a country that was used to being ruled by others, first by Western powers, than by Japan, than by the rapacious Chiang Kai-shek.

China wound up deciding the only way to deal with its past national humiliation was to become strong economically. I wonder, however, if--given the shackles of its history--its present economic miracle would have occurred had it not been for its self-imposed suffering. Thomas Friedman in The Earth is Flat quotes the mayor of Dalian (a mid-sized for China northern city of 5.5 million) as saying:

My personal feeling is that Chinese youngsters are more ambitious than Japanese or American youngsters in recent years, but I don't think they are ambitious enough, because they are not as ambitious as my generation. Because our generation, before they got into universities and colleges, were sent to distant rural areas and factories and military teams, and went through a very hard time, so in terms of the spirit to overcome and face the hardships, [our generation had to have more ambition] than youngsters nowadays.

It's in some ways Nietzsche's what doesn't kill you and all that, but I think certain countries with specific histories need to go through a 'boot camp' sort of experience, where they're broken down--sometimes in nonsensical, heartless ways because really, how can a society disassemble itself logically--in order to find out what their national soul really is and in order to build a sustainable society.

I'm hopeful Iran will go the same path, and will start its road to recovery by giving up its draining nuclear weapons program in exchange for the U.S. ending its economic embargo. Not sure if the same regime that's dragged the country into this mess will be there to bring them out the other end.

In the meantime, until the pendulumn swings back, the Times' characterization (and it very much is a product of the Times' world view) reminds me of the opening lines of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories (which I always recommend as the perfect introduction to this greatest of living authors)

"There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy even though the skies were blue."

Polaris photo of woman at Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's tomb by Newsha Tavakolian for the Times.